Changes

[csoult]

How do you hunt differently now vs how you hunted a few years ago? What was the change that made the biggest difference in seeing and closing the deal on mature bucks?

[elk yinzer]

Well I moved 3 years ago, so that was huge. Went from hunting familiar haunts I grew up hunting to vast amounts of fresh ground. That change reinvigorated whitetails in a big way for me.

As far as strategy, the realization that hunting a lot of deer vs. the right deer are different. I've hunted bedding areas all my life, but I try to pay a little more attention to specific buck beds now. My hunting style is always morphing. So it's hard to point to one specific change in strategy but most years I find a way to get it done, and my biggest pay-in to punching my ticket is almost always time investment and perseverance.

[hoyt31786]

1. How had style changed? I try to spend my time hunting in the areas mature deer spend 90% of there time vs where i used to hunt where they passed thru or spent lesser time in those areas.

2. Biggest key to changing and being successful.? Spending More time Scouting than hunting knowing and finding those areas where mature deer spend majority of their time. Studying how and when to get in those areas effectively to go for the kill. Its made me a way better and efficent hunter!

[Boogieman1]

1.) How's my style changed? In all honesty in the early days I didn't have a style. Tried all kinds of stuff slowly figuring out what works for me and what doesn't. I discovered which kind of landscape I like to hunt and which kind I don't. I prefer farm country with 80% fields and 20% woods. So I seek out these areas. If they ever stop producing then I will change my style again and find something else.

Biggest changes .. I now hunt smarter instead of harder. Hunted everyday of the season for many years cause I believed I had to just to have a chance. Now I'm a believer nothing good happens without proper timing. For that reason, I prefer to hunt just a handful of properties I know like the back of my hand and when they are prime. Versus hundreds of places I really don't know much about so I'm just guessing. But like everyone else some places dry up so Im still constantly searching for new spots. But now I know what I'm looking for.

[Jdw]

It has been more of a gradual implementation of small details than big changes for me.
Studying and using thermals to my advantage and paying close attention to access have helped me a lot.
But those only make a difference if there is a buck in the area and you’re where he will move in daylight.

[rfickes87]

How do you hunt differently now vs how you hunted a few years ago? What was the change that made the biggest difference in seeing and closing the deal on mature bucks?

My style has drastically changed.

Pre 2016 I never really considered bedding. I hunted rub lines and scrapes and "good spots" on the family farm and on public here in Bedford County. The summer of 2016 i found Dan and this website. I went out and immediately started finding beds and (against Dan's advise) I put a lot of cameras directly over the beds. Even though I believed in Dan's advise, back then I guess I felt like I have to see it visually on a camera to prove it to myself that bed hunting could work. So by the time October came around I had totally blown up all those bedding areas by checking my cameras every couple weeks all summer long. 2016 was a terrible year for me even though I had some slobs on camera in daylight as you can imagine I didn't go well and I ate tag soup for the first time in years. My hunting regressed instead of progress. It was some hard bone headed lessons!

2017 was the first year I ever spring scouted. That was the turning point for me. All those spring beds would prove to still be in use that fall. I ended up missing a 110 in buck on game lands and wounded a 130 inch in rifle season. i got to hunt about 10 times that year so 2 in 10 sits was really good for me. After wounded that buck i rifle I was so sick and I quit hunting for the year, as mad as I was. But i kept looking for that deer and also scouting all winter and spring.

2018 I killed 2 bucks on 3 sits with the bow (pa and oh public). I didn't use any cameras in these kill areas, just in areas I planned to hunt in the future and I left these areas alone all summer. These were both quick calculated kills just based off of spring scouting and setting up on hot sign. However, the ohio kill was 100% cyber scouting only. I went in on that hunt totally blind and never stepped foot on that property before (thanks ONX MAPS!).

2019 I have even more spots picked out. This is the first year in 10 years that I haven't hung any cameras at all. I'm too convinced that I'll just bugar up the areas I want to hunt and also so confident in my scouting from back in February/March that I've convinced myself to just sit back and wait till the first correct wind i need of the season and then go in for the kill. Complete and utter surprise is such a huge advantage. Also new to this year is just listening and writing down about any rumors of big bucks I heard from last year and marking them down on maps, making notes. I spent alot of time on foot and the computer scouting the nearest bedding in areas I heard of big bucks. One particular day my heart was beating thru my chest while I was scouting a certain bedding area back in Feb/March after listening to rumors. I didn't need a camera in there to know he's alive and that he's big. Any buck over 100 will make me happy and I still don't try to target bucks but I do try to find the absolute best slam dunk of a bedding area that I can find out there.

We'll see what happens this year. 4 years of this now I have a good bit of bedding inventory to hunt so that's nice. A lot of spots now to fall back on if things don't go like they should. A lot of great areas to hunt that will be up to me to screw up.

[csoult]

2019 I have even more spots picked out. This is the first year in 10 years that I haven't hung any cameras at all. I'm too convinced that I'll just bugar up the areas I want to hunt

I am convinced that this ruins more hunts then it ever helps. Putting them in and letting them soak I think can give great information, but checking them on a regular basis will change deer patterns without a doubt.

[elk yinzer]

I agree on the cameras, totally stopped using them. I used them heavily in 2017 and it was great because it gave me a perspective of what the better bucks in my area look like, and that was about all the valuable intel they gave me.

Cameras effect way too much confirmation bias in my decision making process.

[rfickes87]

2019 I have even more spots picked out. This is the first year in 10 years that I haven't hung any cameras at all. I'm too convinced that I'll just bugar up the areas I want to hunt

I am convinced that this ruins more hunts then it ever helps. Putting them in and letting them soak I think can give great information, but checking them on a regular basis will change deer patterns without a doubt.

Absolutely! Fall of 2017 I put a camera on a faint deer trail that I found about 15 yards down from an old clear cut on the south facing slope. Trail ran parallel to the ridge crest and the bedding area. I left it there for 6 weeks during all of archery season. I had 6 different legal 90-110 inch bucks walk that trail during shooting hours. EVERY single wind was a north wind when they showed up. This was game lands. I think there were 8 North winds all season long. I have an excel spreadsheet somewhere where I marked every single wind down, even days I saw no deer on camera I still marked the wind. Never saw a good buck on any other wind.

It was nice seeing that intel and matching their movements with the correct wind. But in the end, it was all information that any regular on this site would expect to see. It was what I predicted and just showed why I put the camera there in the first place. So it really didn't tell me anything that I didn't already predict and know.

[Crazinamatese]

Stanley taught me a thing or two here that have changed how I do things in recent years. I remember him saying that its ok to set up late in the morning for cruising bucks during the rut. There is usually a breeze toward late morning and helps cover the noise of your approach and set up rather than dealing with dead cold silence at day break and blowing your set up nefore the hunt begins. All my mature buck encounters the last 4 seasons have all been midday because of the what I learned from Stanley.

[Ranger Matthews]

For me it was sitting all day. One it forced me to scout hard for good spots. It’s tough to sit all day in an area you don’t have 100% confidence. I have shot half of my good deer between 10 - 2. The rut lasts only so long and for me it all about maximizing that time.

[milkweed-militia]

My biggest change has been getting "confident" in being mobile.

Honestly, the people that hunt mobile in my area are pretty much zero. Even the guys that use climbers just hang them at the base of a tree and leave them there for the season (private land). Hunting public areas is more foreign to most around here than hunting mobile. Some of my in-laws got me into hunting about nine years ago, so I was grandfathered in to this mentality.

When I got onto The Hunting Beast (through Aaron when he was at Midwest Whitetail) I knew that being mobile was going to lead to more success. I saw their results, I saw Dan's and read about a lot of you guys while I was stalking the site before signing up, but I still had the thought in my head for a while that I was going to miss something if I wasn't in old faithful.

I don't really know what it was specifically. But, i went from thinking that I was going to miss something if I wasn't in the pre-hung stands to thinking that I was never going to kill anything good if I did. My encounters have skyrocketed compared to what they were.

You can read all the stuff on here, but if you don't truly believe that it's going to work, you will never see it through.

[cspot]

IMG_04612_zpsbc113716 by cspot12, on Flickr

This photo is probably a pretty good picture of my change. This picture represents a good chunk of my hunting experience for over a decade. This picture is taken from my porch. My living room as a big bay window that gives me the same view. I also have a little smaller view behind the house. I can see in some places up to about 3/4 of a mile. Anyway since I live there, I am constantly observing deer movement. I can be mowing the grass, drinking a coffee on the porch, etc and I can see where they are moving. Now in PA we don't get many mature buck, but we (have 3 kids that hunt) have done pretty well at this place. Now I would still scout the woods, but I didn't realize how much I was relying on observation and not in searching out other sign. With observation I didn't really need to and I didn't need to know why they were bedding somewhere, just where they were bedding. While I may not know the bed they came out of, I could piece together pretty easy where they were bedding most of the time. With years and years of hunting this place, it became pretty easy to know where they would be. My only scouting would be food sources so I would have a good idea of where they were headed at various times throughout the fall. Now the place has been timbered and a couple of gaslines got put thru that all changed patterns and bedding areas, so we were always adjusting. However since I pretty much had 365 days of surveillance footage it wasn't hard to adapt. We would still hit frustrating stretches in the season, but usually that was after the kids were tagged out and I was hunting on my own. LOL. In addition since this is actively farmed it is common for the neighbor to be out along fencelines and such so the deer are used to intrusion and it is easy access to stands without really pushing deer out of the area.

This all changed about 3 years ago when we bought a 13 acres in Ohio. Been busy with building a cabin and working on the property for the last couple of years, so my scouting was limited. I also fell in to the trap of "I bought 13 acres so I am going to kill a buck on that 13 acres to justify buying the 13 acres". LOL. Kinda silly but it is true and I have killed a couple of buck there. We border a huge amount of public though so it isn't like I have to travel far. One thing that Dan said in one of the videos of he has seen private that is hunted to death, but the public property adjacent to it is not would probably pretty much describe my place the last couple of years. The one thing I noticed in the big woods vs my home turf is the deer were really sensitive to human intrusion. On our place even the does and fawns will stay away for a couple of days if they get spooked off. Also hunting big woods was a big change from hunting the broken farmland that I was used to. The deer density was also less, so it was also an adjustment of not seeing the deer that I was used to seeing. Anyway even though I have had some success, I know that I was not really in the game so to speak and I needed to branch out. Probably a year ago someone mentioned the old hill dvd being good, so I bought it. When I watched it, I had a lot of "Oh yeah that makes sense" moments because thinking of a lot of our setups it now made sense why the deer were bedding where they where. With pretty much finishing the cabin right before season last year this meant that I would start to have more time down there to start to put things together. Still hunted a lot on our place last year, but I did end up getting a mature buck on public land off the ground. The place was a spot that I had turkey hunted and thought it would be good for deer. Pretty much just walked in and found a bunch of fresh sign and setup on it. Killed a buck within a couple of hours. May have been and probably was luck, but I will admit that it has given me confidence to do that more.

WIth the cabin being done I put a lot of boot leather on the ground starting in gun season when hunting with my son and thru the Spring there. With being big woods and not living there it takes observation from being my main scouting to pretty much being a zero. Been reading on here and have used that info to help cut out some areas and concentrate more on where they are likely bedding. I have a lot of new areas and spots that I am excited to hunt this year.

[JAK]

1 being mobile
2 hunting hot sign
Before beast i hunted same few spots all year every year.
In the 2 years ive beast hunted i killed a nice buck and have seen allot more bucks.